January 11, 2023
Toward A Unified Theory Of The Untraditional Artwork
- Client
Every generation believes they reinvent art. Amongst the current archipelago of networks, technologies, and platforms, between the chips of blinking things and the chaos; the art world and its adherents (you, me, us) have always harboured designs to understand, to figure out where new art comes from and where it’s going. A negative ozone lingers around this conversation. Feelings of puritanism and paranoia prevail. The difference in attitudes from those on either side of the ongoing “tech”/AI discourse expresses very richly to me a fissure that runs through our imaginative thinking, calling into question artistic freedom and its deficits.
We live in an age when technology can now generate artwork. Until recently, everything on earth came from either nature or humans. We have just welcomed a third party: AI.
To simplify it: neural-like networks are trained to create images from descriptive prompts. You can make any conceivable artwork by just telling these networks what you want to see.
Already, we understand the consequences these innovations bring forth. Companies are terminating contracts with artists in favour of faster, cheaper, AI-generated commercial work. Perhaps most sinister of all is the process of “Scraping”, in which this software is being parasitically ‘trained’ using datasets that are fed images of artists’ pre-existing artwork without their consent or knowledge. Meaning: you can make very sophisticated, original ‘dupes’ of anyone’s artwork for free. Just last month, an artist noticed the mashed-up, mangled and warped iterations of a signature at the bottom of many AI-Generated images.
It is important to keep in mind that these machines are trained to see objectively, which is something we humans have never been able to champion. As a result, generated works have a noticeably impersonal aesthetic force to them; they are, at times, ambivalent. A truth for you, reader: The easier it is to generate artwork, the more challenging it will be to generate distinction and meaning.
AI-based art often struggles to create a personalised style without “spawning” from the database of other artists’ work. This caters to the very human tendency to ask finally, “what is art without the subtext of an artist?” Chicken or the egg?
Beautiful art comes from this culture. Those who distinguish themselves do it well (see: Holly Herndon, Matthew Dryhurst, Ezra Miller, Honor Levy, Ilya Shipkin, and Anna Condo). More and more artists use this tech to pioneer forward, to realise the digital sublime. They exert control over the software by creatively degrading the language it is nourished with. This good work has an air of something quantum and fantastical, like it might be summoned from another dimension, sentiments similar to what artist Kelly McKernan said when she saw her ‘scraped dupes’, finding out her work had been unknowingly fed into the dataset. “I felt my soul leave my body. I’d known these paintings in another life, but they weren’t mine.” Familiar and still unknown – Generated Art’s oeuvre.
The generated work’s blemish is also its charm. It is made up of material that can only assert itself; however, using it to make art frees oneself up from the impediment of materiality. In vindication of the generated work, I would acknowledge it as a symptom of entropy that is necessary for innovation. I’ll explain why.
The comprehensive timeline of art is full of near-death extinctions and narrative arcs. The story of Pictorialism is a great one for understanding this. In the late 19th and early 20th century, painting approached redundancy following the invention of the camera. At first, the technological know-how required to operate a camera was reserved for a small few (much like the genesis of AI). Still, as the crest of the wave broke, as cameras became accessible, more art was made by them. Photographers turned away from using the camera to precisely and accurately depict reality (its intended job), instead chasing ephemeral and subjective beauty in their images, which sparked an extensive debate about what constitutes art, and condemned painters across industries to become obsolete. A similar thing happened more recently (the 80s) with the introduction of the Digital Audio Workstation and musicians. This narrow separation of technology and art, of industry and innovation – is perhaps the art world’s oldest tradition. If art is the star you steer by, you rely on this invention. These principles emerge into reality in the upcoming Northern Rivers Creative group show <cite>, where this tension is the driving force; its ethics are unspooled, probed and inspected in the Lone Goat gallery space. I urge no one to presume that their corner of art is safe from this innovation. It is a simple matter of time before this software becomes more capable- we are seeing these leaps all the time now. Things that seemed unattainable for these learning systems a week ago are finessed today. It is not slanderous. It doesn’t refuse the natural or deface the poetic.
Appropriation, determinism and Danto’s Pluralism are a few things that dominate the fears and fascinations surrounding this discourse. Big questions are asked. It strikes the inner mantel of an electric understanding, an ‘essence’, that the discipline of art theory has been attempting to articulate for millennia. In the spirit of this, <cite> is a timely reassurance of the artist’s natural desire for the exalted, the upward slant, the old feeling with a new face. It is a show that reassures you of the curiosity that burns at the core of the ‘untraditional’ artwork. If the two complementary polarities in this discussion hold one belief in common, it is that the world is already being transformed, just as it always has. So in its metamorphosis, actually stays quite the same. Whatever you think, go to see Lone Goat’s <cite> universe; observe when you disagree with a work. It’ll tell you a lot about yourself.